Running Head: TOP TEN SYNTHESIS FINAL EXAM

Top Ten Synthesis- Final Exam

ECI 540

Corrie Dobis

North Carolina State University

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I have come to learn that reading instruction is a “blending” of many different

approaches. As stated in our text “Best Practices in Literacy Instruction”, “Literacy instruction is

the art of knowing how to assemble the tools in concert with each other to make worthwhile

instruction that is particular to the students and purposes in a given classroom” (Morrow, et al.,

2019, p.44). In order to create comprehensive literacy instruction, there have been many research

studies that have taken place to find the best practices to put into action. There are two broad

categories these best practices belong to, and those are the content dimensions and the contextual

dimensions. Authors Morrow, et al., (2019) note the content dimensions consider the “what to

teach” aspects such as choosing texts of the correct difficulty level, giving students access to

multiple genres of literature, and disciplinary literacy which makes sure to acknowledge “the

demands of the content and the needs of the learner” (p.39). The contextual dimensions, on the

other hand, include “considerations of students’ interest and motivation, the nature of student

interactions, and how to best facilitate or support such interactions” (p. 39). We want to ensure

that students are motivated in their authentic tasks, having conversations about the text, and

respecting that sometimes as educators there is a time to explicitly instruct students and a time to

facilitate and participate with them.

Learning more about how to create a comprehensive approach to literacy is important to

me because I have always asked myself the question of “What more can I do?”. This question I

have broadens to many different aspects of the classroom and it has been eye-opening to be able

to read about so much research and other professional educators that are also seeking to answer

the same question. There is no one “right answer” but an infusion of practices that make for

successful students ready for the future.

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In our text “Reading Instruction that Works”, (Pressley & Allington, 2015, p. 52) the

authors note from a National Research Council report that “high-quality lessons in high-

motivation classrooms were more likely to be the solution than adhering to any particular

approach to teaching children to read.” It is my goal to consider all viewpoints and research

noted to take away that giving authentic tasks in which students are independently motivated to

read, write, and think for themselves is, and will be the end goal for everyday literacy instruction

in my future classroom.

Students feel empowered to learn in a classroom atmosphere that is positive, inclusive,

and supportive. In the book “Best Practices in Literacy Instruction”, the importance of creating

a supportive classroom is investigated and it is mentioned that when teachers create a positive

community of learners, “students are willing to take on learning challenges and make mistakes-

all necessary to continued learning and development” (Morrow, Gambrell, Malloy, & Marinak,

2019, p. 4). The “community-centered pedagogy” is one that stresses a focus on learning

activities that involve student participation in meaningful group work and social collaboration in

these positive environments (Morrow, Gambrell, Malloy, & Marinak, 2019, p. 4). Reading

instruction and achievement can then be enhanced when we have such an immersive

environment for students. Creating successful readers involves attention to the emotions our

students present in the classroom as well. Mentioned in our text “On Developing Readers”, there

also needs to be a focus on the role emotions play in memory and comprehension in reading. In

recent scientific studies, “neurologists have proven that reading comprehension is a complex and

individual constructive process” (Scherer, Scharer, Pinnell, Lyons, & Fountas, 2016, p.31). Our

emotions then, in turn, create neural networks needed to process information, think, understand,
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and remember information. This is extremely important to me as an educator because we must

encourage students to face challenges, and when they make mistakes we need to respond in a

manner that a child remembers as positive, not negative. When students continually experience

difficulty in their learning and sense disapproval, they will create a network of memories from

these negative emotions. I have had students in my classroom that have voiced they believed

they were not good readers, students that have read just the beginning of a passage and said: “I

can’t do it”. If I had responded to them by saying “You’re right you can’t do it”, or “ Why are

you reading so slowly?”, my students would remember their literacy experiences as stressful and

uninviting. Therefore, students will not want to place themselves in the same learning situations

again. By creating a positive community and supportive emotional experiences for students, I

can begin to see a shift in my students’ willingness to learn. In my teaching practice, I will

continue to make quality interactions with students in my literacy and overall instruction. I want

to focus on creating an environment for students where they are motivated to learn, and only

experience pure confidence in their choices.

One of the key ingredients in reading instruction is a student’s knowledge and application

of word study skills. There are multiple steps involved in the literacy development of a child and

having explicit instruction in each of these domains is critical to a students’ later success in

multiple areas under reading comprehension. These domains of word study include knowledge

of phonics, vocabulary, and spelling and are broken up into stages a learner developmentally

arrives at and drives teachers differentiated instruction. It is important to note that with explicit

word study instruction comes many debates of the effectiveness in a skills-emphasis approach to

word study or a meaning-emphasis approach. In the skills-emphasis approach students are

“systematically taught letter-sound associations, and how to blend the sounds made by letters to
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pronounce and recognize words” (Pressley & Allington, 2015, p. 175). The meaning-emphasis

approach, however, debates that students should be reading words within real texts, with

meaningful contexts, instead of using texts such as decodable readers. Authors Pressley and

Allington (2015) use evidence from the National Reading Panel to report that “no particular type

of decoding instruction was more effective than the other approaches” (p.180).

My big take-away from this argument in the foundational steps of word study instruction

is that there should be a fine balance between both methods. We should be teaching students the

building blocks of reading with things such as the alphabetic principle, phonemic awareness,

phonics, decoding, and so on. However, we should be teaching these skills in the context of real

literature and not decodable texts. By providing students with holistic reading and writing

activities, then they can begin to use their word recognition skills to make meaning in their

classroom reading experiences.

In my future teaching career, I hope to incorporate this knowledge of creating explicit

teaching moments for these foundational reading skills in word study while making meaningful

reading experiences students can practice these skills under. Word study approaches in isolation

is not the answer to produce sufficient readers. My future students will have opportunities to read

engaging complex texts in order to apply their explicit decoding lessons!

In our class, I have found that when we build fluent readers we are not just building

readers that can just read fast. We do not want students to become fast readers that “emphasize

speed over meaning” (Scherer & Rasinski, 2016, p.40). Teaching students to become fluent

readers means that our instruction begins with decoding skills. Once students have a strong

foundation in phonics and decoding skills, the teacher can then begin to help students

automatically process these words for meaning - ultimately a bridge that links them to
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understanding a text. Prosodic reading is the final step in building fluent readers. Prosodic

reading means that readers are phrasing parts of the text, reading punctuation, and are showing

expression to interpret the text. Meaningful fluency instruction is important to my future

classroom because I am more aware of its effect on students’ comprehension abilities. Students

automaticity and prosody in reading contributes greatly to the overall comprehension of a text.

They do not have to spend copious amounts of time identifying or decoding words and can spend

more of their time focusing on comprehension. Prosodic reading allows the readers to bring a

text to life, and they are able to take away the authors’ deeper meanings. For future instruction,

some continued best practices I want to ensure students are receiving are assisted and repeated

readings of texts. Authors Kuhn, Rasinski, & Young articulate the importance of repeated

readings by stating “First, it is important to stress that repetition does, indeed, help students

develop their automaticity-as well as their prosody; this, in turn, helps ensure that learners

become fluent readers” (2019. p.276). Incorporating these two practices within a wide range of

text genres will help my students become confident fluent readers.

Our goal as teachers is to show students that reading has a purpose that is far greater than

just extracting information to complete an assignment or a test. The ultimate purpose of reading

that we want to instill in our students is its ability to “change” how we view ourselves and the

world around us. Authors Kylene Beers and Robert Probst (2017) argue that “the ultimate goal of

reading is to become more than we are at the moment; to become better than we are now; to

become what we did not know we wanted to become” (p.59). In order for students to realize the

power reading has in helping their views of themselves and the world around them change, we

need to encourage them to be responsible, and responsive readers. How do we do this precisely?
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One framework I found to be absolutely helpful is addressing this need in reading is

called the “Book, Head, Heart” (BHH) Framework. The “Book, Head, Heart” framework allows

students to think about what the text is about, how the text interacts with their own thinking, and

finally, their feelings are awakened by a text. Learning about this framework helped me connect

to the steps I have taken in my previous years of teaching to help students become responsible

and engaged readers. In the past, I created a lot of anchor charts that provided the “In the Book”

& “In your Head” question starters but I did not create enough structures for students to share

feelings a text aroused in them. More often than not my instruction has been centered around

figuring out what the main idea of the text is about. In my future instruction, I would like to

provide more visual aids and prompts in the classroom to help students become more aware of

their thoughts and feelings as they relate to the context of a text. Building compassionate readers

that are cognizant of how reading shapes their lives are those that are going to inspire change not

only in themselves but others. It is my hope to provide time and practice to integrate frameworks

such as the (BHH) Framework (Beers & Probst, 2017) in my future classroom so that students

see reading as an interactive experience, and not a task to be completed and turned in.

A balanced literacy block is one that includes instruction specific to the teaching of

vocabulary. Many of us know “that most vocabulary words are learned incidentally in context”

(Sternberg, 1987, as cited in Pressley & Allington, 2015, p. 248). These natural incidents may

include family conversations that happen in the household to children simply noticing objects in

a local store or in the community (Pressley & Allington, 2015). What is certain, is that a student

needs to be learning around 3,000-4,000 words per school year until they reach the 12th grade

(Graves, 2006, as cited in Morrow, Gambrell, & Ganske, 2019, p. 202). In order to accomplish
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this goal, I have learned about a few best practices that I would like to use in my future

classroom. These best practices include providing rich vocabulary instruction aimed at teaching

morphology, the use of context clues, and including an environment that uses vocabulary-rich

language. Introducing these practices will help students begin the process of understanding the

aspects of word knowledge; the breadth of knowledge or the number of words a person knows

versus the depth of knowledge, meaning the understanding of words multiple meanings and

contexts they can be used in (Pressley & Allington, 2015). I am aware that students’ overall

vocabulary knowledge can affect their reading comprehension. A lack of understanding and

meaning from the vocabulary used in a text can hinder the message a reader retrieves. It is

important that I am aware of vocabulary instruction in the classroom because I need to be

making opportunities for children without the same knowledge backgrounds to practice

academic language. My hope in the future is to create a vocabulary rich setting in which an

interest in word learning is encouraged, practiced, and celebrated. I want students to begin

feeling confident in generalizing and applying their word knowledge, but this will only happen if

I provide the setting necessary to do so.

In the words of Pressley and Allington (2015), “It should be no surprise that the volume

of reading a reader engages in is linked to higher levels of reading performance.” (p. 77) While

we want to give students reading a high volume of reading time, it is important to incorporate a

wide variety of texts into a classroom library. What do I mean by a wide variety of texts? A wide

variety of texts for students should include a balance of literature and informational books. When

teachers choose the variety of texts students should be using, this should also require looking at

the complexity of a text. When a text is complex, it does not necessarily mean that it is just hard

for someone to read, rather it is designed by multiple perspectives and does not “lay out a readers
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thinking” (Ehrenworth, 2016). When we are purposeful as teachers in our selection of texts, we

create more opportunities in which students become insightful and engaged readers. Learning

about how to engage students in meaningful interactions with informational texts is especially

important to me because I want students to understand that non-fiction texts are not just always

the “truth”. Author Mary Ehrenworth (2016) stated that rather “it’s someone’s perspective on the

truth” ( p.72), which I wholeheartedly agree with. In my future instruction in the classroom, this

practice is something that will benefit all readers. Choosing engaging, accessible, and complex

informative texts will allow me to help students develop their own perspectives, analyze an

author's craft, and curate their own intellectual stances on topics (Ehrenworth, 2016, p.73).

Creating motivated readers in the classroom can be a cumbersome task. As students enter

the upper grades, they are continuing to become less interested in reading and are not putting

forth the effort to learn about the world around them. I have been able to learn about how

motivation impacts students reading abilities and the importance of addressing this issue with

students as soon as it starts to arise. Authors Guthrie and Barber (2019) simplify reading

motivations into three areas. These include students’ interest in the material they’re reading, their

ability to show dedication in believing that what they read is important, and their confidence in

knowing that they can achieve a reading goal (p.53). As an educator, it is our goal to instill these

indicators of motivation in every student we teach. These coincide with building students’

“growth mindset” and helping students to understand that they are in control of their own

“effort”. Therefore, Guthrie and Barber (2019) highlight that this will lead to students exerting

more effort in the future if they see that it linked to a success in reading from the past (p.381). It

was very important for me to learn about multiple best practices that I could begin to put into

action in order to create a classroom that fosters students’ growth mindsets. Some of these best
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practices included placing an emphasis on learning activities with collaborative opportunities,

using real-world literary pieces, creating relevance, and giving choice to students for reading

materials (Morrow, Gambrell, Guthrie, & Barber, 2019). In my future instruction, I would really

like to also be cognizant of building students’ intrinsic motivation to read and not focus on

extrinsic motivators such as prizes. Students will have long-term reading success if they are

intrinsically motivated and will develop into readers that think critically. Growing students’ self-

confidence and their ability to become intrinsically motivated will ultimately lead them to

become ready for the digital literacy world (Morrow, Gambrell, Guthrie, & Barber, 2019, p.68).

This learning is important to the future of my instruction, as I have learned the importance of my

role in growing students reading motivation and helping them to become a part of a growing

technology and digitally based world.

Reading assessments can often feel like endless tasks in which students interact with

daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. What I have learned is that there are many dangers in test

preparation and things teachers need to keep in mind when having students complete summative

and formative assessments. Although we may feel the pressure of increasing students’ test

scores, our reading instruction should not be interrupted by test preparation. “Students learn

about what really matters in reading comprehension from what their teachers prioritize in their

instruction” (Davis & Vehabovic, 2018) and if we don’t prioritize rich and complex instruction

over test preparation, our students will notice this implicit message. Beers & Probst (2017)

discuss that there needs to be a shift in education in which we move away from completing

things “so as to succeed” (p.109). With this mindset, students are extrinsically motivated and this

is not essentially “sustainable over the long haul” (p.109). Rather we need to shift our

perspective as educators to doing something “and achieving success” (p.109) where students are
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looking beyond just a short term goal. I think this idea is valuable to think about because I do not

want to educate students into thinking that the end goal of reading is to test their abilities or that

their comprehension of a text is the final goal. I want to focus on student engagement in my

reading lessons and help them become lifelong learners that are passionate about the world

around them! With this knowledge I have gained I plan to be more aware and cognizant of the

testing pressures I must present to my students. For example, I want to be using complex texts by

real authors instead of test-formatted passages. There is a balance where these tasks must be

given for data purposes and times where reading instruction should be uninterrupted by high-

stakes testing preparation. I want to be a part of a school community where I can lead by

example and help my students move beyond the goal of passing a test to the goal of becoming a

passionate lifelong learner.

When working with struggling readers, it is important that we as teachers are delivering

instruction that is complex and employs rigorous accelerated learning opportunities. This should

be instruction for all students and not just those of a higher socio-economic background.

Classrooms that engage students in complex instruction are those that include having students

collaboratively explore real-world problems with inquiry-based projects, they use anchor texts to

spark interest, allow time to explore new digital literacies and text compilations, and organize

instruction based on a variety of formats (Morrow, Gambrell, Risko , & Walker-Dalhouse,

2019). Within all of these diverse experiences, I have learned that explicit instruction is not

something to be lost. A variety of teaching formats allows teachers to meet with students in small

groups and even individually. Students that are struggling with reading comprehension need

additional help to refine skills they have gained in one context to the next, or even to gain a new
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tool that will help them to better engage with a text. It is important for me to be aware that

providing small group and individual explicit instruction should always be driven by a variety of

assessment tools. This will allow me to differentiate lesson content in a way that makes for a

more personalized learning experience. In future instruction, I plan to be cognizant of how my

explicit instruction for struggling readers is supported with positive relationships gained from

conversations with myself and their peers. I want to be a part of the teaching movement that

closes achievement gaps and succeeds in providing rich education for every student, from every

background.

References

Beers, G. K., & Probst, R. E. (2017). Disrupting thinking: why how we read matters. New York,
NY: Scholastic Inc.

Davis, D.S., Vehabovic, N. (2018). The Dangers of Test Preparation: What Students Learn (and
Don't Learn) About Reading Comprehension From Test‐centric Literacy Instruction. The
Reading Teacher, 71( 5), 579– 588.

Ehrenworth , M. (2016). On developing readers: readings from Educational leadership. (M.

Scherer, Ed.). Alexandria, VA USA: ASCD.

Ganske , K. (2019). Best practices in literacy instruction. (L. M. Morrow & L. B. Gambrell,
Eds.). New York: The Guilford Press.

Guthrie, J. T., & Barber, A. T. (2019). Best practices in literacy instruction. (L. M. Morrow & L.
B. Gambrell, Eds.). New York: The Guilford Press.

Kuhn, M., Rasinski , T., & Young, C. (2019). Best practices in literacy instruction. (L. M.
Morrow & L. B. Gambrell, Eds.). New York: The Guilford Press.

Madda, C. L., Griffo, V. B., Pearson, P. D., & Raphael, T. E. (2019). Best practices in literacy
instruction. (L. M. Morrow & L. B. Gambrell, Eds.) (6th ed.). New York: The Guilford
Press.
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Malloy, J. A., Marinak, B. A., & Gambrell, L. B. (2019). Best practices in literacy instruction.
(L. M. Morrow & L. B. Gambrell, Eds.) (6th ed.). New York: The Guilford Press.

Pressley, M. and Allington, R. (2015). Reading instruction that works. 4th ed. New York: The
Guilford Press.

Rasinski , T. (2016). On developing readers: readings from Educational leadership. (M. L.

Scherer, Ed.). Alexandria, VA USA: ASCD.

Risko , Victoria J., & Walker-Dalhouse, D. (2019). Best practices in literacy instruction. (L. M.
Morrow & L. B. Gambrell, Eds.). New York: The Guilford Press.

Scharer, P. L., Pinnell, G. S., Lyons, C., & Fountas , I. (2016). On developing readers: readings
from Educational leadership. (M. Scherer, Ed.). Alexandria, VA USA: ASCD.

Sternberg, R. J. (1987). Most vocabulary is learned from context. In M. G. McKeown & M. E.

Curtis (Eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition (pp. 89-105). Hillsdale, NJ, US:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.